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Tag Archives: Dell Ideastorm

Have you ever had an experience using a product that motivated you to tell the world about it? Web designers Erik Frick and Adam Meisel did. Their professional use of Adobe products spawned the creation of a small site called Dear Adobe that could be used as a sounding board to vent their frustrations.

Once launched, news of the site traveled fast, and almost a thousand entries (mostly rants) were posted to the site in the first 24 hours. Inside of 48 hours, Adobe began to take notice with John Nack, Adobe’s Principal Product Manager for Photoshop writing about the site on his blog and actually crafting responses to several of the Dear Adobe rants. In just two weeks time the site exploded to over a million page views and hundreds of new submissions were being added daily.

Sites like these are a continued reminder to companies that consumers can have a significant impact on your brand in the online space. Fortunately, Adobe was listening and is now getting involved in responding to the gripes. This was a good first step for them to make, but what else could they do to leverage the situation? Hopefully, Adobe executives are able to see this as an opportunity to take a lesson from Dell’s Ideastorm community and purchase the site to integrate it into Adobe.com. It would be a bold move that would show the Adobe community that they really do care.

Ultimately, what Adobe does with all the rants (aka, valuable information) still remains to be seen. Their product suite has been around for a very long time and has grown to mammoth proportions. The cost of implementing some of the most popular changes might be next to impossible without major re-writes, while others like adjusting their prices (currently the #2 most popular gripe) might be easier to implement.

Takeaways

Put yourself in Adobe’s shoes and reflect on how your own company currently interacts with the online space. What online monitoring processes does your company have in place? Are you prepared to get involved and respond to your customer community when a “Dear YourCompanyName” site suddenly pops up? What is stopping you from boldly implementing your own Dear Adobe?